"Your body is the first thing any child of man ever wanted. Therefore dispose yourself to be loved, to be wanted, to be available. Be there for them with a vengeance. Be a gracious, bending woman. Incline your ear, your heart, your hands to them.... To be a Mother is to be the sacrament - the effective symbol - of place. Mothers do not make homes, they are our home." from Bed and Board, Robert Farrar Capon

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Rachel Jankovic started using the phrase "too many straws in my milkshake" as a description of feeling like you don't have anything left to give because it's early in the morning and you're already feeling sucked dry.

"At our house we always find it better to think it's funny: too many straws in my milkshake, became a saying for us, because it's a more cheerful way of looking at it than, I feel wasted right now..."

And if you've read this, you know her desire is to honor God and lean on Him through all the joys and trials of the vocation of motherhood.

She warns about cleaning the house, but leaving the hearts cluttered, if your whole motive is to make sure that you look like the best mother/baker/cleaner/whatever.

I really like that she often says, "And I was talking with my husband about this, and he was helping me see..."

The above quotes are from these video clips. I really enjoyed listening to them while I was working in the kitchen. And great for busy moms: they're just little snippets, about six minutes long.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Yet the only realities we experience are concrete - this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man.

When
we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are
not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain, or Personality....

This is our dilemma - either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste
-

or, more strictly to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an
experience

or to lack another kind because we are outside it.

As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about;

as tasting, touching, willing, loving, hating, we do not clearly understand.

The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off:

the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think."

Myth Became Fact, C. S. Lewis (reprinted in God in the Dock)

Gerrit Dou, Girl Chopping Onions, 1646

Hey, wild-eyed lady in the painting, surely that's a perfect time to think, right?

I mean, you're just chopping onions? What's so hard about that?

Well (apart from the flood of tears and smeared mascara that would grace my face at such a time) there's also the little boy, saying, "Mom? Mom? Could I have this onion for an experiment?"

And then you try to think. You try. Can he? What experiment? I don't like experiments. Why does he make me have to think about this right now, when I'm getting ready to instruct the little person setting the table about which side to put the fork on, for the tenth time. And listening to that same wrong piano note from the other room. Can he? Think... think.